Trump’s Middle East Peace Plan 1-30-2020

30, January 2020                        Trump’s Middle East Peace Plan


Trump’s Middle East Peace Plan is a complete sham. It is a desperate effort to distract the public from his impeachment and to protect Prime Minister Netanyahu from heading to prison. Trump for obstruction of justice and abuse of power and Netanyahu for fraud, bribery and breach of trust. 


The timing is a playbook of President Clinton’s Middle East peace plan launched in December 1998 to distract the public from his impeachment.

The Peace plan deprives the Palestinians of nearly everything they had been fighting for: East Jerusalem as their national capital, the removal of Jewish settlements on the West Bank, and territorial contiguity and control over their own borders and security that a sovereign state normally enjoys. Palestinians driven from their homes in Israel have no right to return. Contrast that with Jews who receive a warm welcome and enjoy residential rights in Israel from anywhere in the world. 

The plan is an apartheid plan calling for a continuation of the for settler colonialism of Palestinian land.

The language is especially galling calling for Palestinians to make more concessions, to a people who have stolen their land and forced them to live in abject poverty. It is an absolute travesty that we continue to prop up Israel with $billions in economic and military aid to perpetuate this grave injustice. 

Today, more than a million Palestinian refugees live in poverty.

The sole agency dedicated to assist them is the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, known as UNRWA. In a further effort to appease Israel and intensify the suffering of the Palestinians, the Trump administration has cut all economic support to UNRWA.

With virtually no global support the plan is destined for the trash heap of diplomatic history.

Hilary Clinton 1-24-2020

24, January 2020                   Hilary Clinton

Hilary Clinton’s vilification of Senator Bernie Sanders is shameless. Clinton and Trump have much in common. Both are thin-skinned harboring deep resentments. 

Sanders’s is running on a platform of rooting out corruption in Washington. His message has been consistent long before Donald Trump became president. In the 2016 election, Clinton was clearly embarrassed when Sanders took her to task for her close ties with Wall Street, raking in tens of thousands of dollars for short speaking engagements. 


The Democratic Party needs to do some soul searching and apologize to Sanders for its blatant partiality to Clinton when chairperson, Donna Brazile leaked questions to her prior to a critical debate. Brazile was forced to resign in disgrace but is still appearing on CNN’s Sunday morning show. 

Sanders excel at generating righteous anger at the establishment demanding health care for all Americans, a right enjoyed by all advanced democratic societies. He is the only candidate to take aim at the bloated US military. As a Jew, he has also expressed outrage at Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and questions the rationale of rewarding Israel billions of US taxpayers’ dollars while 37 million Americans are suffering from chronic food insecurity, many living in homeless shelters.

Sanders also deserve credit for his relentless reminder of the appalling wealth inequalities in America.

Income disparities have become so pronounced that America’s top 10 percent now average more than nine times as much income as the bottom 90 percent. Americans in the top 1 percent tower stunningly higher.

Sanders constantly reminds us that the super-rich and large corporations do not pay their fair share in taxes, instead they horde their wealth and stash it in overseas tax havens. Conversely, Clinton has enjoyed incredible wealth and power most of her adult life. When Sanders lost to Clinton in the Democratic primary he still campaigned on her behalf. It is shameful she has stated she does not plan to return the favor. It is possible the 2020 election could tilt in Trump’s favor if Sanders becomes the Democratic nominee. Trump could use Clinton’s criticism of Sanders to energize his base. That would be a travesty.

Politicians lie, soldiers & civilians die 1-20-2020

20, January 2020            Politicians lie, soldiers & civilians die 

The story of the death of Cpl. Jimmy Cleveland Kinsey recently went viral.
He and his wife had been childhood sweethearts meeting at the render age of 12 and 14. Shortly after they got married Kinsey went to the army recruitment center where they promised to train him as a marine and provide him with good survival skills.

Meanwhile former President Bush and Vice-President, Dick Cheney were busy launching a massive propaganda campaign to justify an invasion of Iraq. The propaganda war was so successful that 80% of Americans supported the invasion convinced that Saddam Hussein had WMD’s. Analysts in the UK and the US reported that their governments applied enormous pressure on their spy agencies to “cook up” the justification of launching the invasion. 

Cleve Kinsey was one the early victims. He was wounded in Ramadi, Iraq, about three months after his marriage. His wife was suddenly forced to assume a new role, a caregiver. Cleve was in excruciating pain and was  on opioids for the remainder of his short life. He finally succumbed to an overdose. Following his death his wife received a neatly folded American flag, a symbol of the Government’s enormous deceit and dishonesty to its soldiers who have become the fodders of war.

Those who opposed the war were deemed unpatriotic. “Either you are with us or against us” was the slogan used by pro-war politicians. Journalists were imbedded with soldiers to discourage honest reporting.

There was also little debate in the run-up to the invasion of Afghanistan. A few of the perpetrators of 9/11 had escaped to Afghanistan and were protected by the Taliban and Pakistan. In an effort to minimize human US causalities, the Pentagon conducted a massive drone war killing thousands of innocent civilians which intensified the rage against the US . Repeating the same misguided strategies in Iraq, the military continues its massive air bombardment which is proving to be totally ineffective against the growing insurgency and tribal affinities.

Under the irrational leadership of President Trump, the US continues its downward slide.
Our military continues to engage in more misguided foreign adventures, punishing Iran for adhering to the 2015 nuclear agreement. The other timid P5+ members have fallen into lock step with US demands threatening to impose even greater sanctions’ on Iran. This is economic blackmail. We have a long history of waging wars of terror on smaller nations in futile attempt to impose regime changes. Our leaders have lied repeatedly to misguide the American public (recent examples, Vietnam, Iran and Afghanistan). The CIA has engaged in raw terror across the globe torturing and maiming scores of people in black sites and supporting right wing dictators in much of Central and South America. Trillions of dollars and millions of lives have been lost in this insane attempt to demonstrate raw US military power,

The US has blood on its hands 1-13-2020

13, January 2020              The US has blood on its hands

The Iranian government blacklisted our military as a terrorist organization. We might come to the same conclusion after examining our dark history.

Sadly, we are the bad actors masquerading as the good guys.

The American people can be so easily manipulated by Pentagon propaganda regurgitated by “expert” media pundits who constantly feed us a diet of ‘junk breaking news’ to keep us hooked much like Facebook captures our private information and directs us to dark sites to amplify our biases and bolster their profits. 

Truth be told, we have blood on our hands, lots of it.

Geraldine Brooks, a former Wall Street reporter, covering the Middle East, reminded us that in July 1988 the United States Navy warship, Vincennes “accidentally” shot down Iran Air 655, a civilian passenger plane. Subsequent investigations assigned the blame to Capt. Rodger’s reckless aggression. To add insult to injury, Rodgers was decorated “for exceptionally meritorious conduct”. I wonder how Americans would feel if Iran pinned a medal on a man who killed 290 American civilians.

During the Iran-Iraq war, the US and the Israelis provided Saddam Hussein, with missile technology which was used to reduce the Iranian city of Khorramshahr to rubble. Subsequently, US supplied chemical agent technology to Hussein which he used on the Iranians making the US complicit in Iraq’s war crimes. America has been undermining Iran for decades beginning with the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 in a blatant theft of their oil. We further destabilized Iran with the help of Israel who trained their secret police, the Savak, who launched a reign of terror on the Iranians. The deposed Mosaddegh was replaced by a US puppet, the Shah, who returned the favor by buying $billions of unnecessary weapons to enrich US defense contractors.  We continued our meddling with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 under the pretext of hunting for Saddam Hussein, WMD’s.

Currently, the US State Department has become largely irrelevant. All decisions are made by one man, the maniacal Donald Trump who has no moral compass who reneged from the Iranian nuclear deal and imposed crushing sanctions impoverishing the Iranian people. He continues to gaslight the American public with preposterous statements. For example he threatened to impose sanctions on Iraq if they demanded the withdrawal of American troops from the American air base. There are NO American air bases in Iraq. The airbase in Bagdad belongs to Iraq and has been loaned to the Americans. The time to leave Iraq and stop meddling in other counties domestic affairs is NOW.

“Wag the Dog” - again 1-8-2020

8, January 2020                    “Wag the Dog” - again  

Our political leaders have an annoying habit of repeating failed survival strategies. They also feed the American public with mega doses of false information to mask embarrassing political blunders. Remember the New York Times story 1998 headlined “Impeachment Vote in House delayed as Clinton Launches Iraq Air Strike, Citing Military Need to Move Swiftly” started to circulate on social media. This picture was widely shared by those who argued that Trump, like Clinton, was attempting to “wag the dog,” a colloquialism that means to distract attention away from a political scandal (in this case impeachment), often through military action.

Trump has told approximately 15,000 lies in his disastrous presidency. The sycophant Republicans and his advisors, most notably the morally challenged Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo has stubbornly defended their sociopathic boss. Pompeo used the age old defense claiming actionable intelligence to justify the killing of General Qasem Soleimani.  Trump and his aides seem to be very selective in relying on intelligence. They rejected claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election but lauds intelligence when it suits their political agendas. As Lau Tzu’s maxim reminds us, “all wars are based on deception, the first casualty is truth.” 

The erratic Trump, paralyzed with fear over his impeachment is distracting the public with a bogus national emergency. 

 “When a man deceives me once, says the Italian proverb, it is his fault; when twice, it is mine.”".